Janet D. Stemwedel (whose nom de blog is Dr. Free-Ride) is an associate professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. Before becoming a philosopher, she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. Email her at dr.freeride@gmail.com.
It's hard to know the best way to blog a dinner (especially when you have agreed, with your dinner companions, that each of you should blog it to discover whether the result is a Rashoman-like situation wherein each description might as well have been of a different event). Also, I was up late packing and up early catching my airport shuttle. So this may be somewhat stream of (un)consciousness.
The Restaurant
Very good food. Very bad service. The umeshisho makimono was especially good. Less good: the fact that the veggie sushi was plated with the non-veggie, resulting in half of my avocado roll being covered in those tiny orange fish eggs. (Julie and Geeky Mom graciously disposed of the tainted avocado roll for me.)
Slow service isn't actually the worst thing when you're dining with people with whom you could talk for hours.
Topics of Discussion
In no particular order:
- The range of technical abilities, not to mention willingness to try to figure things out, manifested by faculty members who interact with academic technologists.
- Churches that blithely hand out brochures telling their congregants how to vote while maintaining their tax-exempt status.
- After a late night of drinking and carousing, eel is not the best entree to choose for lunch.
- Some bloggers seem to look like how they blog.
- Regional variations in the ambiance at Cracker Barrel.
- Waffle House.
- Scrapple and birch beer.
- Optimal strategies for studying for comprehensive exams in English literature.
- Why it might be that some faculty members don't have any apparent strategies for dealing with disruptive students in graduate classes.
- How we might program BlogHer if we had control over such things.
- Our abiding distrust for vendors of a certain sort at conferences.
- The inadvisability of letting one's cat develop a sushi habit.
- Hour 40 of not-sleeping is about when the hallucinations start.
- Certain academics refer to an A-list blogger of note as "that unemployed economist"; what's up with that?
- Wasabi is good. That feeling that blood might just start rushing out your nose? Even better.
Being airborne right now (literally), I haven't checked Julie's or Geeky Mom's accounts of this confab yet. By the time this posts, though, you may be able to.
Comments
Why it might be that some faculty members don't have any apparent strategies for dealing with disruptive students in graduate classes.
OK, help me out here. What are they?
I have never had the outright, openly disruptive students, but I have had the subtly disruptive students-- the whiners who convince other students that Things Are Bad, and who "sort of" cheat, but can't easily be caught at it.
What does one do????
-Rob
Posted by: Rob Knop | July 30, 2006 11:46 AM
Posted by: PZ Myers
| July 30, 2006 2:33 PM
"Regional variations in the ambiance at Cracker Barrel."
I wish I had been there for that discussion.
"The inadvisability of letting one's cat develop a sushi habit."
Oooh, and that one, too.
Posted by: George | July 30, 2006 6:05 PM
Wow, that's a lot of topics. We're a talktative and stream of conscious-like crew.
Posted by: Laura | July 30, 2006 9:28 PM
PZ, I'm still befuddled by that one too, and I'm the subject of the statement! It's all very unclear.
Posted by: JM | July 30, 2006 9:54 PM
PZ looks like he writes too.
Posted by: Laura | August 1, 2006 2:43 PM